Last Line (4 page)

“Not a clue, mate.”

John didn’t need his excuses, not with Michael. He forgot that sometimes. Mike had Quin’s best interests at heart, but had never judged John for not being able to provide them. John shot him a look of gratitude for the honest reply, and they fell silent. Mike knew when to let a topic go, as well.

Then, to John’s dismay, he turned to him and raised a more crucial and unanswerable one still. “Speaking of irresponsible sex… God, you are
careful
, aren’t you? I-I don’t need to be worried about that?”

John stared at him. In part it was a desperate effort to figure him out—to read, in the beautiful midnight gaze interrogating his, where the hell the question came from. Because although John had folded up his yearning as small as it would go—taken no for his answer—when Michael quietly offered co-parenting services, followed up rapidly by concern for his sexual well-being, John couldn’t help but imagine how life might have been if things were different. If
partners
meant everything, not their nine-to-five.

If Mike were hopelessly fucking well in love too.

“Yes,” John grated out. “Belt and braces hygiene.”
Because if, in some other bloody world, you changed your mind, I couldn’t bear the thought of not being clean for you
. “For God’s sake, Mike… I’m not stupid.”

“No. I know.” Michael was turning away. Was he blushing? John couldn’t see. The morning had darkened, the rain coming down hard now. “It’s just… Quin’s got no one left apart from you.”

Both of them jumped when one of the Met officers tapped on the windshield. John wound down his window. “What?”

The man didn’t flinch at the snarl. He was a negotiator, John saw, and looked as if he’d had a hard morning. A megaphone dangled from his hand. “One of you two called Mikhaili South?”

John twisted round to look at Mike. He frowned. His pallor had turned to a shade of putty. “Yeah, but…”

“I am.” Michael sounded like he’d just been punched in the gut. “I’m Michael South. Not…not Mikhaili.”

“Well, whatever. Guy in there’s asking for you by name. And he’s strapped from top to toe with Semtex, so you might want to come and get a briefing with my chief before you decide what to do.”

Chapter Four

To move in absolute silence, disturbing the air no more than a shaft of dusty light from a stained-glass window… It was its own keen pleasure, and Michael immersed himself in it, prowling down the shadowy south aisle. His H&K was in his hand, a reassuring weight. He didn’t have to think of anything beyond the moment, this moment of animal functioning, of skilled predation. Of moving in silence.

You move more quietly than I do now and faster than any of the others.

Michael stilled his bone-deep flinch before it could reach the surface. There was no need for it. Anzhel Mattvei sometimes spoke inside his head. That was to be expected. They had hunted together for months in the wasteland forests of Zemelya, Michael using Anzhel to track the province’s crazed religious leader, Lukas Oriel. That mission had failed. There were days when Michael could face the memories of what he had done in its name and days when he couldn’t. The second type were few and far between now, three years down the line, and he took care that they occurred in his off duty. Took care that John Griffin never saw.

John. Michael sought him, located him in a pool of blue-green light in the church’s west end. Relief undid locked muscle across Michael’s shoulders.
And with his varying childness, cures in me thoughts that would thick my blood
… Michael smiled, beginning to make his way to him.
Varying childness
was hardly right in a hard-as-nails ex-maritime security man, but John’s unhidden delight in the fat Last Line pay packet, his joyful obsession with clothes, cars, and general good living, never failed to distract and amuse his partner. Once, a long time ago—before MI5, before Zemelya—Michael had taken great pleasure in such things himself.

It was good to watch him. John had seen him now—felt his glance, as always, like a touch to his shoulder—and was coming to meet him. Once, a long time ago, Michael had fallen asleep on his sofa, woken with his head in John’s lap, with John’s sculpted mouth trailing kisses up the side of his face. And Michael had said no. Their partnership had been young, fluid. They had absorbed the shock. John had got over him, moving on energetically to other satisfactions.

They met by the heavy wooden doors. The church was a strange one, Gothic revival wedged into the suburbs. Leaping too high for its length, arches disappearing into raftered dusk where doves and pigeons scratched restlessly, crossing the dizzying overhead space in a pulsating flutter of wings. John stood poised, clearly listening like the good agent he was, making sure that their racket concealed nothing else. Then he turned to look at Michael. “I don’t think he’s in here anymore.”

Michael came to stand by his shoulder. He was chilly for some reason, and John, who normally was cool as water even on the hottest summer day, seemed to be casting off delicious heat. “I don’t think so either,” he said. Between them they had quartered the church, every inch of it. “But I’m damned if I know how. The coppers have got every exit sealed.”

“Well, we’ll take another turn…” John paused, frowning. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. Why?”

“You’re shivering.”

“No, I…” Michael straightened away from him and made sure it was true before he finished, “No, I’m not. I just…don’t like churches for some reason. And this one gives me the willies.”

John chuckled softly. “The actual
willies
? I didn’t think big strong MI5 men were allowed to get those.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what we get. Come on, then. Let’s do another sweep so we can get out of here.”

“Okay. But what was that business with your name back there? With…”

“
Mikhaili
!”

John and Michael jolted back into the shadows, seeking cover, automatically raising weaponry. The voice had seemed to come from everywhere, bouncing off the stained glass, making unseen bells somewhere vibrate. Back pressed to a pillar, Michael frantically scanned the shadows for the man they had missed—he and John, who missed nothing…

“Mike! Up there!”

Michael jerked his head up, following the direction of John’s PPK. Automatically he had raised his own pistol too, and now had it trained on a human figure poised among the doves, high in the roof space. They’d missed him because there was nowhere to walk up there, not if you were flesh and blood. There was a single bar of wood, the top of the screen that divided the nave from the chancel. It wouldn’t support a man’s weight.

But this can’t be a man, Michael’s shocked mind told him. A ghost, a memory. Summer flu coming on, a warning mirage of fever. He had walked into a forest clearing three years ago, doing what he had to in order to maintain his cover and stay close to Anzhel Mattvei. There had been ashkeloi gypsies there. And this man—this man looking down on him from the rood screen now—had come toward him through the firelight, fearless, ready to defend his people.

“Piotr,” he whispered.

“Mike? You know this guy?”

Michael spared John a glance. He shook his head, trying to make the face smiling down at him now something other than the relic of a nightmare. “I don’t know. It can’t be.”

“Stay here. Keep him talking.”

Michael drew breath to argue. But even an inhalation took too long when John had made his mind up, and the hand Michael threw out to stop him closed on empty air. He was gone—no more than a shadow’s reflection, soundlessly climbing the stairs to the gallery.

Keep him talking
. Michael had to. The man in the loft shifted, spreading his arms. The folds of his jacket—Christ, the same coat he’d worn in the forest that night—fell open, revealing the sinister bulk around his waist and chest. The streets around the church had been evacuated, but the place was half-derelict, ready to fall apart. An explosion would bring it down, and even if at this moment Michael wasn’t sure he cared, John had set out fearlessly to stop it.

Yes. For John, he could still think and speak. “You were with the ashkeloi,” he rasped. “You died.”

“Are you sure, Mikhaili? Those were strange nights, weren’t they, when you ran with Anzhel Mattvei.”

“What do you know about Anzhel?” Michael didn’t register that he’d said the words in Zemel, in the language of his year-long immersion. That he’d been triggered to do so by hearing it. The foreign syllables hissed off his tongue. “He shot you. I saw it. You can’t be here.”

His vision fogged. He scraped a hand across his eyes to clear it, and when he looked again, it was as if Piotr had agreed with the impossibility of his presence. The space on the rood screen was empty, full of dust and sunlight, as if he’d never been.

Reality asserted itself. Whoever the hell was up there, he was four pounds of Semtex on the loose. “John!” Michael yelled, running for the gallery stairs. “I lost him. He’s moving!”

“Got him!”

John’s voice rang from the far east end of the roof space, almost over the altar. Through bloodstained sparks, Michael saw him ease lithely over the gallery rail and onto a rafter. “Griff, come back off there. It won’t hold you.”

“It’s fine. Just don’t try to follow me. It won’t take both of us. What did you call him? Piotr?”

“Yes, but…” Desperately Michael followed the focus of his attention and saw the dark shape pressed into the gallery on the other side. Masonry dust was crumbling from it, small stones beginning to detach. “Jesus, get back here, Griff. That far side’s about to come down.”

“Piotr? Listen to me, mate. I don’t know who strapped you into the gelly suit, but believe me, they don’t give a damn about you. And you’re not off to martyr’s heaven with dancing girls and sherbet. You’re just gonna die. And you’re gonna take me and my partner with you, and…” John wobbled on the rafter beam, corrected himself with a cat’s grace. “And we’re not in the mood. So you just stay there till I can get to you and see if I can disarm all that crap or get it off you.”

Christ, he sounded as calm as if he were offering to fix Piotr’s car. Hands clenching tight to the stone balustrade on his own side, Michael watched, frozen. John took fearlessness to lunatic lengths. Always had. Debonair and smiling, he would walk into the fire. And it was as if nature—fate—gave his blithe courage back to him, shielding him from consequence; Michael had never known him to suffer so much as a scratch.

He was almost there. Michael, dry-mouthed, took a double-handed aim on the middle of Piotr’s forehead. A misplaced shot would detonate the bastard, but a good direct hit through the skull would drop him where he stood. “Freeze,” he growled. John threw him a puzzled glance, and he heard himself, but continued in Zemelyan to be sure their prey would understand. “Don’t move a muscle, Piotr. Let him help you.”

“Help me?” Piotr shook his head. “I don’t need help, Mikhaili. I’m just a messenger—a falling star.”

He stepped off the edge of the gallery. For an instant he seemed to hang in the air. Then he dropped, a flight of pigeons clattering upward as he fell.

Michael saw John duck his head and turn away. It was instinct—if pointless—to huddle from a blast. Why wasn’t he doing the same? His reflexes felt dead in him. He couldn’t even blink as Piotr hit the floor thirty feet below. He saw and heard everything—impact, crunch of bone—and then that was over, and like John, he stood there waiting for the flash.

It didn’t come. Ten or so seconds elapsed. Then John, poised between the rafters and the gallery, lifted his head. He turned around carefully. He looked down gravely into the nave of the church, where Piotr and the twelve pounds of Semtex, which for some reason hadn’t gone off, lay shattered and still. Then he broke out into his crazy, soaring, beautiful teenager’s laugh.

Michael wanted to join him. But a brutal fist was twisting in his guts. He couldn’t react to the cessation of threat. Instead, he shuddered with conviction of a dark wing still stretched over them. “All right,” he said, shifting cautiously to extend a hand in John’s direction. “Hilarious. Now get your arse back over here, quick.”

“On me way.” Smoothly John turned on the rafter. “What the hell was that about, though? I thought we’d had it. And I never gave you a last—” The laughter died out of his voice, leaving it flat. “Oh fuck.”

“What is it?” But a heartbeat later, Michael saw. The beam’s far end, fixed into the masonry, had shifted. Falling stonework from the gallery had loosened the mortar around it. As he watched, the whole structure of the rafters jolted down an inch, and then another. “Griff! Get off there. Jump!”

John tried. It was as perfect and athletic an effort as anyone could have made—valiant, hopeful, launching powerfully up and across to the gallery. His hands closed on the stone railing. And Michael knew—they both did, in the moment when their eyes met, wide sea green to depthless black—that it was not enough. John said faintly, “Mikey.” Then the stonework turned to dust beneath his grasp.

* * *

Michael walked slowly through the stained-glass light. He was down in the nave of the church. He must have come back down the steps to get here, but he had no recall.

Dust was still settling. Outside in the suburban morning, the skies must have cleared, uncertain sunlight beginning to shaft and probe. The doves disturbed from the rafters were calling to one another. Michael walked. His hands were loose at his sides. Every joint in his body had turned to rusty iron. He could barely move, but still he kept walking, on and on, heavy and cold.

He stopped and looked at the space where the altar would have been. There was still a pile of packing crates there, as if whoever had cleared the place had felt that something should mark the spot. He drew a breath. His lungs were turned to iron too—or it would have been a sob. He would have expelled it in a raw howl that would bring the rest of this godforsaken hulk down on him. He wanted it to come down. He wanted it to burn. He stared blindly at the absent altar and prayed for conflagration.

Don’t you feel it in yourself yet, Michael? The power, the love of fire?